As Poland Endures Hard Times, Capitalism Comes Under Attack

By Ian Fisher, New York Times, 12 June 2002

SZCZECIN, Poland—In Communist times, no one was louder than
Poland's famously feisty shipyard workers about the state's
inability to provide a decent standard of living. So now it seems a
cruel joke that, as the sparkle fades from the market economy, it is
private enterprise that has failed them.

Since March, the Szczecin shipyard has been closed, and 6,000 workers
have not been paid. When violence loomed, the government stepped in,
announcing a plan in May that would, for the first time, renationalize
a Polish company.

“It is certainly very abnormal,” said Bogoslaw Rydzenski,
48, a worker. “No one could have predicted this.”

These are hard times in Poland, which grew for nearly 10 straight
years into a country of stocked shelves, giant malls and impressive
self-confidence—a 40-million-strong symbol of Central
Europe's post-Communist hopes.

Now, the will to continue privatization and other reforms, and even
the desire to join the European Union, have flagged. The story is much
the same around the region, as the transformation from gangly state
economies has brought material comfort, but also insecurity and a new
set of inequalities. In Poland, indeed, the very notion that
Western-style capitalism will work in the eastern nation that embraced
it perhaps most heartily is under attack.

“There is an apropos graffiti,” Krzysztof Bledowski, an
economist, said as he sat in a cafe in downtown Warsaw. He pointed
across the street to a car parts shop, where someone had scrawled on a
wall: “Free market, enslaved people.”